Tracing Silences

Silence is crucial to our social world. Responding to the growing scholarly interest in social sciences and humanities for more in-depth engagements with social silence, this book explores what it means to trace silences and to include traces of silences in our scholarly representations. What qualifies as silence, and how does it relate to articulation, to voice, visibility and representation? How can silences be sensed and experienced viscerally as well as narratively? And how do we think with and interpret silences in the face of potential unknowability? Grounded in ethnographic research in the Netherlands, Israel, Turkey, China, and Indonesia, the chapters all contribute to a theorization of silence that embraces multivocality, unintelligibility and uncertainty of interpretation. As a collection of cutting-edge scholarly work at the intersection of anthropology and history, Tracing Silences argues for an in-depth engagement with the unspeakable and unspoken, through a range of modes and methods, and in the historical, social, and political ways in which they emerge and are enacted in the particularities of people’s lives. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, anthropology, sociology, political science and archival studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Global and local contestations are not only gendered, they also raise important questions about agency and its practice and location in the twenty-first century. Silence and voice are being increasingly debated as sites of agency within feminist research on conflict and insecurity. Drawing on a wide range of feminist approaches, this volume examines the various ways that silence and voice have been contested in feminist research, and their impact on how agency is understood and performed, particularly in situations of conflict and insecurity. The collection makes an important and timely contribution to interdisciplinary feminist theorizing of silence, voice and agency in global politics. Interrogating the intellectual landscape of existing debates about agency, silence and voice in an increasingly unequal and conflict-ridden world, the contributors to this volume challenge the dominant narratives of agency based on voice or speech alone as a necessary precondition for understanding or negotiating agency or empowerment. Many of the authors have engaged in field research in both the Global South and North and bring in-depth and diverse gendered case studies to their analysis, focusing on the increasing importance of examining silence as well as voice for understanding gender and agency in an increasingly embattled and complicated world. This book will contribute to and deepen existing discussions of agency, silence and voice in development, culture and gender studies, political economy, postcolonial and de-colonial scholarship as well as in the field of International Relations.

Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and re-evaluation, but also art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself but also the more complex expectations of 'genre': of the forms expected within a given context and type of communication. This collection of essays by internationl academics draws on a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities to examine how far the expectations and forms of genre shape different kinds of autobiography and influence what messages they can convey. After investigating the problem of genre definition, and tracing the evolution of genre as a concept, contributors explore such issues as: * How far can we argue that what people narrate in their autobiographical stories is selected and shaped by the reportoire of genre available to them? * To what extent is oral autobiography shaped by its social and cultural context? * What is the relationship between autobiographical sources and the ethnographer? Narrative and Genre presents exciting new debates in an emerging field and will encourage international and interdisciplinary debate. Its authors and contributors are scholars from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, literary analysis, psychoanalysis, social history, and sociology.

A meditation on the infinite search for meanings in silence, from Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, the author of The Other Side of the Tiber and Mother Tongue. We need quiet to feel nothing, to hear silence that brings back proportion and the beauty of not knowing except for the outlines of what we live every day. Something inner settles. The right to silence unmediated by social judgment. Sitting at a table in an empty kitchen, peeling an apple, I wait for its next transformation. For a few seconds, the red, mottled, dangling skin unwinds what happened to it on earth. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi set out to touch silence for brief experiences of what is real. In images, dreams, and actions, the challenge leads to her heart as a writer. The pages of Silence and Silences form a vast tapestry of meanings shaped by many forces outside personal circumstance. Moving closer, the reader notices intricacies that shift when touched. As the writer steps aside, there is cosmic joy, biological truth, historical injustice. The reader finds women’s voices and women’s silences, sees Agnes Martin’s thin, fine lines and D. H. Lawrence’s artful letters, and becomes a part of Wilde-Menozzi’s examination of the ever-changing self. COVID-19 thrusts itself into the unbounded narrative, and isolation brings with it a new kind of stillness. As Wilde-Menozzi writes, “Reading a book is a way of withdrawing into silence. It is a way of seeing and listening, of pulling back from what is happening at that very moment.” The author has created a record of how we tell ourselves stories, how we think and how we know. Above all, she has made silence a presence as rich as time on the page and given readers space to discover what that means to a life.

How can you do ethnographic field research in a safe way for you and the people you work with? In this nuanced, candid book, researchers from across the globe discuss core challenges faced by ethnographers, reflecting on research from preparation to dissemination and how identity interacts with the realities of doing fieldwork. Building on the work of the editors’ The New Ethnographer Project, which has been seeking to change the way ethnographic methods are approached and taught since 2018, the book: Promotes an inclusive approach that invites you to learn from the challenges faced by a diverse range of scholars. Addresses underexplored issues including emotional and physical safety in the face of ableism, homophobia and racism. Challenges assumptions of what it means to produce knowledge by conducting fieldwork. Whether you’re an undergraduate student or an experienced researcher, this book will help you do fieldwork that is safer, healthier and more ethical.

To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between texts and the silence of the ineffable. This study describes silent dynamics through readings of Pascal's 'Pensees', Rousseau's 'Reveries', and Beckett's trilogy 'Molloy', 'Malone Dies' and 'The Unnameable'.

This volume offers a bold and long-overdue intervention into the field of psychological anthropology. It asks how scholars might both constructively destabilize old frameworks borne from the field’s complex past and seed innovative new engagements in order to chart ethical, responsible, and constructive ways forward. The contributions cover such topics as white supremacy and the production of knowledge, new perspectives on the “disabled” mind, the importance of ethnographic refusal, silence in narrative, and the racialization of therapeutic methods. This timely book seeks to reinvigorate the field and lay groundwork for a new bridge between the subdiscipline and the wider anthropological community. It is an ideal text for courses in anthropology, psychology, and the wider social sciences and humanities.